Methods and system for incorporating a direct attached storage to a network attached storage

Abstract

A Computerized storage system management methods and system configurations. In some embodiments the invention comprises a computer storage data access structure, a DS management and a storage system solution related to methods and a system geared for implementing a scale-out NAS that can effectively utilize client side Flashes while the Flash utilization solution is based on pNFS, the pNFS is comprised of a meta-data server (MDS) and data servers (DSs). There are at least one client and two Data servers, wherein at least one of them is a Direct Attached (Tier0), client level DS. Tier0 DS is a client-side resident low latency memory selected from a group of solid state memories, defined as Storage Class Memories, such as a Flash memory, serving as an integral lowest level of a storage system with a shared storage hierarchy of levels (Tier 0, 1, 2 and so on) and the unified name space.

Description

FIELD AND BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to computer storage data access advanced configurations and memory content management solutions; and more particularly, but not exclusively, to methods and system for implementing a scale-out NAS that can effectively utilize client side solid state memory Flashes, or in general Storage Class Memories (SCM), while the SCM utilization solution is based on pNFS that is comprised of a meta-data server (MDS) and data servers (DSs).[0002]High-performance data centers have been aggressively moving toward parallel technologies like clustered computing and multi-core processors. While this increased use of parallelism overcomes the vast majority of computational bottlenecks, it shifts the performance bottlenecks to the storage I / O system. To ensure that compute clusters deliver the maximum performance, storage systems must be optimized for parallelism. The industry standard Network Attached...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0035]In another embodiment of the computerized storage invention method a shared storage improved data access to a Direct Attached data server located on node X is achieved by files mirroring to provide at least one of the group of benefits, comprising: a) providing a level of inter-node redundancy; and b) accelerating client reads by sharing the load, so that not all clients have to address said node X.

[0036]Yet, in another embodiment of the computerized storage invention method, the access is faster from / to a Direct Attached data server, providing that that is an option for a particular file while the secondary copy of said file could be kept in another data server selected from the group comprising of; a Direct Attached data server, and a shared storage DS.

Problems solved by technology

Performance measurements indicate that usage of the NFS stack, may delay access to the local Flash by a factor of three

Images